It was during and after the annual Easter cross procession from Hethersett Methodist Church to the parish church. I say annual but there hasn't been one over the past two years due to pandemic restrictions.
But now we are all back together again it's terrible to see that time hasn't been kind to some dear people. Obviously we have all aged but it was sad to see some now struggling to walk and having to use sticks and frames.
It all left me with something of an empty feeling as if time is marching forward too fast.
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Two days ago in my blog I mentioned the funeral of our friend Jean Larner. Jean was an accomplished artist who produced some really unusual and original work. Yesterday I noticed that one of her pieces was in the Methodist Church and so I took a photograph of it and that is included with this blog. There are also a few photographs of the village cross procession and then some of forest land in North Norfolk where we visited after the morning activities.
At Kelling Heath they are rearing red squirrels which are so much more attractive than our predominant grey ones. There is a pen which had this reddy dashing back and forth as if he was stressed to the eyeballs. But not so. A plaque informed us that this is normal behaviour and just a way for them to mark their territory whilst in captivity. It's called stereotyping. Which makes me realise that I am not a red squirrel as I have always hated being stereotyped!!
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People have praised my blogs for "going all over the place". They seem to like my musings from a rather deranged mind and like the fact that they never know where my thoughts will take them next. The point is neither do I. I just start writing and then go off at all kinds of tangents as new subjects fly into my mind and very often fly out again just as quickly. I'm just glad that some people like reading them as much as I like writing them.
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Kids today have it made. I'm talking about games. All those video games that do everything apart from eat your tea for you. In my day I used to make up games with butchers' paper, a pencil, counters and a dice. I made up skiing games, football games, cricket games and many more but my crowning achievement was a cricket scoreboard made out of paper and cardboard for when I watched test match cricket on television.
This was a copy of the real scoreboard at say Lord's or The Oval. It was pretty basic but it amused I. The top row of the piece of cardboard would show the scores of the two batsmen and in the middle the team total with the number of wickets just below it. There were also sections for the fall of the last wicket and a few other things. So how did I make this scoreboard I hear you ask (or more likely not)?
Well I cut two slits in the cardboard for say the hundreds and then threaded strips of paper containing the numbers on it. Then for the tens and the singles I would do the same thing. It all worked well until the mass of paper at the back of the cardboard got entangled as it often did. Then one of the strips would tear and had to be replaced, but it was fun and I'm sure I wasn't the only person doing this. We really did amuse ourselves growing up.
Some time in the future I will describe the games I made in more detail. Suffice it so say at this point that they never challenged Monopoly or Scrabble, although I always found them less boring than Monopoly which is a game I absolutely hate because it goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on zzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
Incidentally butchers' paper was (and probably still is in some places) those large white almost shiny pieces of paper that were wrapped around meat. This was all very well but sometimes they had blood stains on them which was ok if you were developing a murder game but not a lot of use for a word puzzle game.